This year’s World Bank Spring Meeting featured a blockbuster event on health entitled, Toward Universal Health Coverage by 2030, featuring United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon, World Bank President Jim Kim, Harvard Professor Lawrence Summers; Nigeria’s Minister of Finance, Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala; World Health Organization Director-General Margaret Chan, and former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg. Following this event, the French and Japanese Missions to the United Nations in New York co-hosted a panel discussion at the United Nations on national experience implementing and measuring universal health coverage citing examples from Chile, Benin, and Thailand; and presentations from both the World Health Organization and the World Bank.

As we celebrate World Malaria Day this year and rally behind its theme, “Invest in the Future, Defeat Malaria,” countries and the global community are celebrating major accomplishments since 2000. Malaria death rates have been reduced by half among young children, and more than 3.3 million lives have been saved. The malaria map is shrinking: Four countries were recently certified as malaria-free (Armenia, Morocco, Turkmenistan and a United Arab Emirates), and 26 more are moving toward eliminating the disease.

Mohammad, a three-year-old boy, lives in Yirimadjo, a community in Mali. A few weeks ago he woke up feeling ill with a high fever. That same morning, Kumba, a community health worker with the nongovernmental organization Muso, visited his family’s home during her daily door-to-door active case-finding visits. On discovering that the child had a fever, she administered a rapid diagnostic test for malaria, and he tested positive.

In this week's edition, we lead with World Malaria Day. Each Friday, we share a selection of global health Tweets, infographics, blog posts, videos and other content of note. For more, follow us @worldbankhealth.

Nowadays there is an awakening of interest in the international community to understand mental illness in its different manifestations and societal impact, and to identify ways to effectively deal with these often misunderstood, neglected and stigmatized conditions.

This week, we recap the World Bank’s Spring Meetings event, “Toward Universal Health Coverage by 2030.” Each Friday, we share a selection of global health Tweets, infographics, blog posts, videos and other content of note. For more, follow us @worldbankhealth.

For the first time in history, more than half the human population lives in cities, and the vast majority of these people are poor. In Africa and Asia, the urban population is expected to increase between 30-50% between 2000 and 2020. This shift has led to a range of new public health problems, among them road traffic safety. Road crashes are the number 1 killer among those aged 15-29, and the 8th leading cause of death worldwide. The deadly impact from accidents is aggravated by pollution from vehicles, which now contributes to six of the top 10 causes of death globally.

In the global survey World We Want 2015, health was the first priority of people living in poor countries. This was not surprising. Every year in Africa, nearly a quarter of a million children under five die because their parents cannot afford to pay for treatment. According to the World Health Organization, 150 million people face catastrophic health care costs every year, while 100 million are pushed into poverty because of direct payments. Increasingly, poor people are protesting the denial of their basic right to access health care when they need it.

In this week's edition, we lead with a new World Bank report on the impact of road accidents worldwide. Each Friday, we share a selection of global health Tweets, infographics, blog posts, videos and other content of note. For more, follow us @worldbankhealth.

The ongoing global initiative to expand universal health coverage (UHC), especially in low- and middle-income countries, is heartening, as is positioning UHC as a focus of the post-2015 development agenda. Most of us hope that UHC will make a real improvement in health status, in addition to expanding population coverage of health services.